“ON and Off the Golf Cart”

By: Ruben Fuentes

In the spring of 2005, my wife told me I was going through a midlife crisis. “There’s nothing wrong with a midlife crisis, honey,” she said to me. “Me? No way! A Latino having a midlife crisis, George Lopez doesn’t have a midlife crisis. I don’t think so; I’m solid as a rock. C’mon man, you are crazy.” I remember telling her. I don’t have an appetite for a high speed boat or Harley Davison motorcycle, I remember thinking to myself.

I had to admit, there was something going on in my life, but what? I was stuck in my professional career and going through a hard time health wise. My left knee and right foot made me unable to exercise like I used to do. I did not know at the time what was wrong, but later we got the diagnosis that it was a medical condition called, Gout. To make matters worse, I’d been in a car accident that injured my cervical spine. My knee and foot disabled me for weeks at a time and the cervical spine injury kept me awake at night. Before these creeping reminders of midlife, I was physically active running three times a week and even trained and finished two marathons. I also worked out lifting weights. These mental and physical issues were messing me up bad. I asked myself, “Am I dwindling dangerously into a depression?”

A buddy of mine, Kevin Smith, wanted to help me and suggested golf to me. He said, “Golf is cool, man, and you don’t have to be in great shape to play it, look at me”. Kevin is a hefty guy, about 6 feet tall and 260 lbs., who doesn’t believe in staying fit; he used to give me rides to my work when I was having these health problems and was not able to drive myself. He would insist, “You can rent a golf cart to carry your lazy butt around the golf course.” The line “your lazy butt” was directed at himself, I’m sure. “Golf! No thanks bro, I tried that thing 20 years ago, and did not like it,” I told him many times. He did not give up and kept suggesting it to me. Every time he mentioned the four letter word, GOLF, a plethora of memories rushed to my head like a motion picture camera in reverse. I would flash back to the late 1980’s when I was a college student attending Fresno State University and my compadre Raul Juarez tried to get me into golf. Raul is a good friend of mine. He is my compadre because he baptized my daughter. I played several times at the River View Golf Course in Fresno California with him. I was a total failure playing golf. I could not comprehend how I missed time and time again this little white golf ball that was just sitting there. When I did manage to hit it, the ball will travel about 10 feet mostly brushing the ground even though I’d swigged as hard as I could. This really annoyed me because I had been a pretty decent athlete in my teen years playing football, soccer, and practicing the sport of boxing. And, there I was not able to hit this little white ball. I blamed it on the sport and concluded that it was not a true sport since I was not able to play it. Compadre Raul tried to instruct me, but I did not put the time or energy. I finally stopped playing it when a golf ball ricocheted from a tree, after I hit it with a 7 iron, and hit my privates so hard that I dropped to my knees. When Compadre Raul saw this, he was laughing so hysterically that he fell of the golf cart. I suspect this is the way most adult Latino males are introduced to the sport of golf. I discovered that I had a better time sitting on the golf cart drinking a cold drink while compadre Raul got in and out of the cart cursing and yelling trying to play the crazy game.

Kevin did not relinquish his plan to get me to play golf, and one day I told him, “Okay, bro, I will play the school golf tournament with you, but you are going to regret inviting me.” I warned him. I played golf for the first time in many years. If you have ever been on a foursome golf tournament, you already know that every player hits the ball once and then the team takes the best shot and all four players hit from there. To my surprise, I had a lot of fun. Kevin made me laugh so much. Once, he fell of the golf cart trying to pick up a golf ball from the ground and the cart kept going until he got back on it and jammed the breaks (Everyone seems to fall of golf carts). After one tee off, from one of the last holes, we all got to use my shot. I was proud.

From then on, golf became part of my life. I started to play with some of my friends. Jaime Escamilla, who had been playing for several years, took a special interest in me. He had the patience to teach me and allowed me to make mistakes while I began to dig the sport. In no time, I was playing golf regularly, and as it happens to many people, I became addicted to it. It was an obsession like when you first meet the girl of your dreams. When you meet the girl of your dreams all you do is think, drink, and dream with that person. And so it was with golf and I. Jaime will tell me, “You caught the golf bug man.” I got so much into the game that all I wanted to do was play and go to the driving range and hit golf balls all day long to the point of developing a tattoo of the golf club on my hands.

My health problems did not improve. The pain on my left knee often times kept me on the sofa for weeks at a time watching golf on the tube. With all that idle time, I kept going over the golf swing over and over in my head. One day I sat with my wife and told her, “I don’t enjoy my job anymore, I am really stuck; I want to take some time off from my career and work on the family ranch while I build a little house there.” Building a house in the ranch and living there has been one of our goals for a long time; I am sure some day I will build this home. My wife agreed that I needed some time to get well physically and mentally. I continued to play golf as much as I could when I was healthy and not working at the ranch. I truly fell in love with the game. Jaime was right; I was hooked on golf. But, it was more than that; I experienced a metamorphosis. I was happy again. I emerged from the dark shadows of depression because of the four letter sport, GOLF.

A year later, I started to work on a part-time basis in my profession as a school counselor and placed the house ranch project on hold, it’s still on hold. The job was in San Juan Bautista California; I worked two to three days a week. This situation was perfect for me at this stage of my life. San Juan Bautista is near Monterey California which is an area famous for its abundance of historical and prestigious golf courses. It’s been refereed as the “Golf Mecca.” I made some time to visit the Pebble Beach Golf Links: Pebble, Spyglass and Spanish Bay. When I was there the courses beckon me to come and play some day. A year later, with Jaime, Louie and Aggie, I played at Spanish Bay. A month later, I played again with my cousin George and my friends Joe and Tommy.

So, as you can see the sport with the four letter word helped me to get back on track with my life. I now play with a handful of friends on a regular basis and with another five or six throughout the year. Of course the camaraderie is great with seemingly endless lessons and stories that we revisit every time we tee it up.

I also play golf with my wife and with my lit’ girl Angelica at two of my home courses, Stevinson Ranch and Pheasant Run. I play the Titleist Pro V-1 and NXT balls.